The truth behind the visual design of David Bowie’s Blackstar

When David Bowie died on January 10th, his last album – its lyrics, design and even release date – were sifted for every possible meaning or portent. This said as much about his fanbase, struggling to come to terms with his death, as it did about the artist, who deeply considered every part of his process.

Last weekend, at the Offset festival of design in Dublin, Jonathan Barnbrook, the designer of four of Bowie's most recent albums – Heathen, The Next Day, Reality and Blackstar – brought some clarity to the situation and cleared up a mystery or two.

Working with, and indeed listening to Bowie, “You feel like your life is defined by one person." Quoting Paul Morley, Barnbrook said "He is kind of a Google for people before the internet. He would go on a creative path and take the mainstream with him.”

In early discussions about the album artwork, Barnbrook said: “We talked about black stars as a force that drives you out and drags you back in. We kept the conversation universal. The idea [in design] is to reflect the emotional landscape of the music”

One picture of Bowie in the artwork is overlaid with a matrix of lines that Barnbrook confirms is the “depression a star makes in spacetime”.

The designer deliberately picked a unicode character and was excited about using an album name that’s from “the world of emoji”. The seemingly simply, ubiquitous characters are now the subject of dozens of scholarly articles and research claiming them as the first properly universal language, with some theories suggesting that the form will become its own standalone form of communication, unmoored from any linguistic harbours.

The beauty about the unicode symbol is that it translates into different technologies, something that probably appealed to Bowie’s technological fascinations.

The symbols at the bottom of the album cover do indeed spell out Bowie’s name. “You don’t have to slap a logo everywhere,” says Barnbrook. “You build up a visual language that people can use.” The plan was always to release the fonts and designs for use by anyone in the wake of the album’s release, but after Bowie’s death, the record company was dragging its heels.

Barnbrook, who has a long history of activism and is no stranger to doing something first and apologising after, decided to release them anyway for Bowie fans. “Someone had to acknowledge their pain and give them the tools to express it,” he says.

You can download the complete set, which is open source, from bowieblackstar.net.

This piece was altered on April 14 for clarification purposes